Israel, Gaza fighting escalates
Middle East Desk Report

GAZA CITY (Gaza Strip)—Israel launched airstrikes against militants firing rockets from the Gaza Strip on Wednesday and vowed to maintain a war “on all fronts” until the territory’s Hamas rulers halt attacks. Vice Premier Haim Ramon said Israel would maintain its blockade of Gaza and reduce supplies of fuel, electricity and some food in an attempt to persuade Hamas to stop the rockets.
Lawmakers in Gaza, meanwhile, canceled a session of the Hamas-dominated legislature, fearing an Israeli attack. A day earlier, an influential Israeli lawmaker urged Israel to assassinate Hamas’ political leaders. Hamas moderately wounded a 14-year-old girl and knocked out power in parts of the rocket-scarred Israeli town of Sderot with a barrage of rockets fired at border communities Tuesday and early Wednesday.
Gaza militants said Israel responded with several airstrikes overnight, but the military confirmed striking only once at militants who had just launched rockets. Hamas said four of its men were moderately wounded. Israel indicated that it would not let up in its attacks. “We need to understand there is a war in the south,” Ramon told Israel Radio. “The war against Hamas has to be fought on all fronts.”
Israel will continue to use the “economic weapon” against the Gaza Strip, said Ramon, a confidant of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s whose statements often reflect the prime minister’s thinking. Israel cut off virtually all shipments into Gaza three weeks ago after Hamas barraged Israel with rockets following an Israeli operation that killed 19 Gazans, most of them militants.
Hamas also took responsibility for a suicide bombing Monday in the southern Israeli town of Dimona. The Islamist group’s first suicide attack in Israel in three years underscored its ability to hamper U.S.-backed efforts by moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to reach a peace deal with Israel by the end of the year. On Wednesday, Abbas condemned the militants’ rocket fire, but urged Israel to let supplies into Gaza.
“These rockets that are being fired at Israel must stop. It’s pointless,” he said at a news conference with Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik. “At the same time, Israel should not use these rockets as a pretext for collective punishment on Palestinians in Gaza. Israel must always allow humanitarian supplies and other needs to be provided to Gaza.”
Israel insists on an end to violence before it implements any peace agreement, but Abbas has had no control over Gaza since Hamas seized control there in June. Monday’s bombers came from the West Bank, not Gaza, giving greater weight to Israel’s demand that Abbas take stronger action against militants in the West Bank, too.
In the West Bank city of Hebron, relatives of Shadi Zghayer and Mohammed al-Herbawi said they learned from watching Hamas’ Al Aqsa TV that the two were identified as the Dimona bombers. The two Hamas members in their 20s left home early Monday without saying where they were going, relatives said. A farewell video of the two bearded bombers that Hamas released Wednesday showed them holding guns and standing in front of Hamas flags. “I, the living martyr Mohammed Karim Mohammed Hijazi al-Herbawi ... sacrifice myself for the sake of God, for the sake of those who are besieged in Gaza, and in response to the crimes of the Zionist occupation,” said the militant, who was wearing a green Hamas headband.
On Tuesday, Tzahi Hanegbi, chairman of the Israeli parliament’s powerful Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said Israel should go after Hamas’ political leaders, and not just its gunmen. Israeli defense officials said they were considering stepping up their airstrikes to target Hamas political leaders in Gaza. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk to the media, said no decisions were immediately made. However, Hamas lawmakers were taking no chances, calling off a meeting “because of the security situation in Gaza,” said Iyad Qarra, media adviser to the legislature’s speaker. The Israeli economic blockade of Gaza has been compounded by Egypt’s sealing of its border with the territory since Hamas’ June takeover.
Late last month, militants tore down sections of Gaza’s border with Egypt, enabling hundreds of thousands of Gazans to break out and buy supplies in an Egyptian border town. After 12 days of anarchy, Egyptian forces sealed the breaks on Sunday. Israeli security chiefs have warned that Palestinian militants used the Gaza-Egypt border breach to slip out of Gaza, and could try to make their way from Egypt through a porous border into Israel. On Wednesday, Israeli leaders approved the construction of a border fence with Egypt.